Charter school association decries state-imposed limits

Published 10:00 pm, Monday, January 30, 2006

Charter schools have grown in popularity to the point that government-imposed limits are preventing further expansion in at least 10 states, a charter school association said in a nationwide survey.

Eight U.S. states already have hit the limits mandated by their legislatures on the growth of charter schools and may reach their caps this year, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools said in a recent report. The group is asking states to end those caps and recommends that the federal government withhold charter-school funding from states that don't comply.

Charter schools are privately run and publicly funded and are open to all children tuition-free. They enroll about 2 percent to 3 percent of the school population in most states, the Washington, D.C.-based association said.

"There is opportunity being denied to families who need it right now," the group's president, Nelson Smith, said in an interview.

States set limits on the number of charter schools, the number of new schools allowed to open each year and the number of students in each school. Some use more than one limit.

Jumoke Academy in Hartford, Conn., has 300 students in kindergarten through sixth grade and a waiting list of 250, said Michael Sharpe, the charter school's chief executive officer. Each year, it gathers applicants in its auditorium to draw names out of a shoebox, Sharpe said.

"It's just sad to see all of these families standing there literally crying because their kids aren't getting into their school of choice," Sharpe said. "It's a very, very painful feeling."

About 3,000 charter schools operate nationwide in 40 states and Washington, D.C.

In Washington state, proponents have tried unsuccessfully to open the door to charter schools. The last attempt, a referendum that came before voters in 2004, was decisively rejected.

Elsewhere in the country, about 39 percent of charter schools already have waiting lists, with an average of 135 students, the charter school association said. Schools in eight states -- Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and Rhode Island -- have reached their limits, and New York and Illinois are close, the group said.

Critics of charter schools include teachers unions, which contend that they skim off the best students from traditional public schools while employing inexperienced and poorly paid teachers.

The U.S. government's most recent set of annual grade-school tests, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, showed that fourth-grade charter school students improved their reading skills at a faster rate than students in traditional public schools.

The gains found in the results, released in October, were particularly strong among lower-income and minority students, especially Hispanics, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools said in its analysis of the test scores.

The American Federation of Teachers, with more than 1.3 million members, said its analysis of the data showed that charter-school students fared worse on math and that eighth-grade low-income charter-school students scored lower in reading.

"More doesn't make for better," Toni Cortese, executive vice president of the union, said in response to Monday's report. "In some ways, it means that there are more schools to monitor and maybe not enough attention given to how they're doing."